All 4 Tony Awards for acting in a musical went to performers of color

Leslie Odom Jr. accepts his Tony Award Sunday night.

(Image credit: Theo Wargo/Getty Images)

published 13 June 2016

History was made during the 70th annual Tony Awards on Sunday night, when for the first time ever, all four musical acting awards went to performers of color.

Hamilton's Leslie Odom Jr. won Best Performance by a Leading Actor; The Color Purple's Cynthia Erivo took home Best Performance by a Leading Actress; Hamilton's Daveed Diggs won Best Performance by a Featured Actor; and Hamilton's Renée Elise Goldsberry won Best Performance by a Featured Actress.

For Hamilton, creator Lin-Manuel Miranda purposely cast actors of color, and other productions also had diverse casts — nearly every actor in The Color Purple and Shuffle Along was black, BuzzFeed News reports; almost every performer in Allegiance was Asian or Asian-American; and most of Spring Awakening's cast was deaf (the show also featured Broadway's first actor in a wheelchair). Eclipsed, a play written by The Walking Dead's Danai Gurira and starring Lupita Nyong'o, also boasted a cast and creative team comprised entirely of women of color.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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